ADOS and Being Grateful

"I'm not grateful, innit."

During the COVID-19 lockdowns from 2020 to 2021, I discovered the audio social media app, Clubhouse. This happened in the middle of a global rise in nationalism from India to Canada. This included Black Americans who inhabit a bit of a nation within a nation as a minority with a strong sense of linked fate. In these spaces, I became familiar with the term “ADOS.” Political commentator Yvette Carnell and attorney Antonio Moore had already created the hashtag #ADOS, which stands for American Descendants of Slaves. According to Carnell, they started it in 2017 to advocate for reparations “for Americans who descended from slavery and had ancestors who lived through Jim Crow.” In 2018, using this hashtag, they tweeted critiques of Democratic presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. Although ADOS was also an organization involved in activism around reparations, it set itself as apart from N’COBRA. In a tweet, Carnell said “N’COBRA arose from the dead like Lazarus to co-opt the momentum of #ADOS, but they’re not committed to federal reparations…. These are puppets of Nancy Pelosi, not nat’l reparations advocates.” As an organization ADOS held its first conference in 2018 where Cornel West and other notable Black people spoke or attended.

In Clubhouse rooms led by people who identified themselves as ADOS and FBA, the discussions involved drawing hard ethnic boundaries against African and Caribbean immigrants. Several held rooms in which they used the term “lineage” in a new way, varying from the traditional definition of an individual’s descendants. Instead, it became a way of describing Black Americans’ notion of ancestry being derived from people enslaved solely in the United States. Otherwise, they used the term to refer to American Indian ancestry, claiming they were indigenous to the Americas.

Eventually there was a shift to the term FBA, which stands for Foundational Black Americans. People who identified in those terms wanted to make sure that Black immigrants would not receive reparations. It was idea rooted in the idea that affirmative action and DEI programs benefitted immigrants and their descendants in unfair proportions vis-à-vis Black Americans. While these types of programs combat current anti-black discrimination, reparations is supposed to rectify the cumulative disadvantage that Black Americans have experienced since arriving in the United States in the 1500s. Although discussions of reparations have largely halted at the federal level, these ADOS and FBA collective identities and references have remained.

Many Black Americans, whether or not they identified as FBA or a DOS, or antagonistic about these rooms. On multiple occasions, they would say that the person who had started the rooms and the people who are speaking, ill of immigrants were “weird.” Several of them said that nobody talks like this in real life, that their terms, most Black people in the United States don’t come across many black immigrants to be concerned with them.

In response to those conversations, Africans would start their own rooms. In these spaces, they would done a great African-Americans and complain about the treatment that they received on the social media app and in person. These rooms are almost always sequential. A room titled “THE PAINFUL TRUTH>Africans/Caribbeans/Hispanics Are NOT BLACK” with thirty participants appeared. Afterwards, a room titled “Do BlackAmericans (sic) decide for the world what/who is ‘black’?” might be scheduled.

Once, I was in a room in which several people said that somebody named “Aloha Charlie” was paying them to start these rooms on Clubhouse. When I looked up the profile for “Aloha Charlie,” it appeared that he had at least fifteen different accounts on Clubhouse. My suspicions around the app increased when people from all around the world complained about Black Americans, relying on controlling images from Hollywood and hiphop videos. When I heard a self-professed Black man with an uncommon accent admit that he was from Finland, I suspected the foreign agents Barack Obama had warned Americans about in the past. That was when I decided to delete the app.

However, before I did, so, I noted a shift in which more Black Americans were creating spaces in which they were trying to express solidarity with Africans and African immigrants.